For decades the common wisdom of parenting manuals was that teenagers feel invulnerable, immortal, and simply perceive less peril in dicey situations and believe they have much more control than they actually do. In short, they underestimate life's very real risks and dangers. But scientists who study adolescent decision making now dispute this common parenting wisdom.

The world we live in today is open. Yet most people still have the same conversations with the same people and wonder why nothing changes. It is those who don't want to be like everyone else who are often misunderstood by a society where conformity is the norm.

Some of us meet the world's expectations only to realize that it failed to give us the fulfillment we sought within ourselves; some of us burnout mid-way trying to fulfill them; some of us realize that there has to be another way to find what we truly seek.

Many of us spend our lives twisting ourselves into shapes and postures that are unnatural and uncomfortable in hopes of gaining acceptance from others whose approval we desire. We may contort ourselves into shapes that are entirely unnatural for us.

It was getting late. Seriously late for a woman my age not to have a ring on her finger. People said, "You're such a nice girl, why aren't you married?" But then, I found a way. I bought a beautiful family... of mannequins.

Coming out appears to be particularly difficult for many Japanese LGBT people because of the importance of social conformity in Japan. Many college students told us that they had known perhaps only one openly LGBT person in their entire lives.

It's unfortunate that gay men with an unhealthy body image can ultimately hurt our shared commitment to individuality and the wider perception of our community. We have failed to challenge the many reasons that we suffer with an unhealthy preoccupation with the physical.

I shudder to think what would become of preaching if there was an instant approval or disapproval button in the hand of everyone in the congregation. Yet that is what we give to the world when we tweet.

I now understand that we mirror each other back and forth. All issues others may have with me or my opinions are about them. I'm mirroring something unbalanced in them, and the brighter my light shines the stronger I will mirror them back. How it all feels in me? That's my stuff to handle.

Sure, debate spin has always been ridiculous, but now we don't even have to wait until the debate's over to have other people tell us what to think. If having ratings on the screen during the debate sounds like a psychological experiment on conformity, that's because it basically is.

It seems fairly evident that risk aversion implies conformity because a society whose members are risk averse would tend to be characterized by a narrow band of actions resulting in predictable outcomes; but is the converse also true?

As a society, we Westerners exalt individualism and self-reliance, and yet our biology moves us in other directions. Humans evolved as social animals, and we posses a number of behaviors that motivate us towards group conformity.

This isn't the first time that we've been talking about crowd reactions after a debate. One question we rarely ask, however, is whether these televised responses change the way that those of us at home feel about the candidates.

Mobbing is widely understood in Europe as a form of collective aggression that profoundly impacts a targeted worker's health and productivity, but less known in the U.S. where "bullying" is a more common explanation for interpersonal workplace aggression.